You can be grateful for a hard season without pretending it didn’t hurt.

Gratitude and pain are not competing accounts of the same period. People tend to pick one and edit the other out, usually because the full version sounds contradictory when said aloud. It is not contradictory. Something can have given you things you now rely on and still have been genuinely bad to live through, and saying both is the only accurate description there is.

Try telling one person the whole version this week rather than the tidy one. What it gave you and what it cost, in the same breath. Notice how much less effort the full account takes than the edited one you have been maintaining.